Facility operators, such as utility facility operators, frequently monitor the status of processes or operations occurring at geographically remote facilities at a central location. For example, operators of oil, gas, and/or water facilities may monitor pressure, temperature, flow rates, fluid levels, and other operating parameters at various field sites at a central control station. Each field site may comprise one or more instruments that collect, process and store measurements of operating parameters.
Conventional monitoring systems enable facility operators to remotely monitor processes and/or operations occurring at oil, gas, water, and other utility facilities and to relay process and/or data to one or more central control stations. For example, Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems have been developed to monitor and communicate with remote facilities. In SCADA systems, the central control station is typically the Master and a field unit located at the field site is the Slave. This inherently determines how data flows from the field unit back to the office because the Slave can only transfer information to the central control station when it is polled. This means that a field unit cannot initiate the transmission of data to the central control station.
Other systems have been developed that enable operators to remotely communicate with remote oil, gas, water, and other utility facilities via other communication networks such as the Internet. However, the transfer of data via such communication networks can be delayed or lost due to traffic levels and/or connection failures.
Also, conventional systems do not enable field units to selectively communicate process and control data via one or more communication networks and/or protocols.